Abstract
Business books have a similar, simple agenda. They tell you how to manage people and organizations successfully. When it comes to how to run the whole operation, they have a similar, simple recipe. They start with the premise (often left unsaid) that organizations consist of two separate sets of activities—management and work—and then concentrate on management alone. Work and workers hardly feature. Managers (“above”) plan, budget, schedule, and coordinate activities; and workers (“below”) follow those plans and schedules. Managers need data and tools to solve problems. This data comes up, from below, in reports, databases, and the like. Workers need “incentives”—both “carrots” and “sticks”—to persuade them to work hard. These come down from above.
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Notes
For one view of the social nature of work life see Dennis Sandow and Ann Murray Allen, “The Nature of Social Collaboration: How Work Really Gets Done,” Reflections:The SoL Journal 6, nos 4—5 (2005): 1—14.
The fact that teams exist in name only explains the title of Michael Schrage’s book, No More Teams!, where he takes a close look at collaboration and how to foster it. See Michael Schrage, No More Teams: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995).
Two books, by ex-management consultants writing with views from practice, provide good insights into the work of consultants: not least the heavy-handed and self-serving way they wield the “tools” of their profession. See Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009); and Theodore Taptiklis, Unmanaging: Opening up the Organization to Its Own Unspoken Knowledge (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Many books and articles define “management” and examine the paradigm. One is Stephen Linstead, Robert Grafton Small, and Paul Jeffcutt, eds., Understanding Management (London: SAGE Publications,1996), an edited volume, with a postmodern orientation, in which contributors highlight the complex, social nature of management and managing. See also Dan Growler and Karen Legge, “The Meaning of Management and Management of Meaning,” in Understanding Management, ed. S Linstead, R.G. Small, and P Jeffcutt (London: SAGE Publications, 1996).
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W.W. Norton, 1911; reprint, 1967); Frederick Winslow Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management,” Bulletin of the Taylor Society, December (1916). Henri Fayol, General and Industrial Management, trans. C. Storrs (London: Pitman, 1949). The huge literature on Taylor’s work includes these contributions: Gail Cooper, “Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management,” in Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, ed. C.W. Pursell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Bernard Doray, From Taylorism to Fordism: A Rational Madness (London: Free Association Books, 1988); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Fredrick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997). Matthew Stewart, The Management Myth, has a unique perspective on Taylor, arguing, ironically, that it was his ability to tell a good story that brought him both fame and fortune, not “the numbers” he professed were so important and, evidently, was so passionate about.
On the evolution of science and the ideas that contributed to the Enlightenment, see Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Hugh Willmott refers to Heidegger’s description of the “period we call modern [as]… defined by the fact that man becomes the centre and measure of all things.” Hugh Willmot, “Bringing Agency (Back) into 0rganizational Analysis: Responding to the Crisis of (Post)Modernity,” in Towards a New Theory of Organizations, eds. John Hassard and Martin Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 0n modernism in organization and management studies see the following which, as they deal with worldviews and the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, are all philosophically oriented: Robert Chia, “From Modern to Postmodern 0rganizational Analysis,” Organization Studies 16, no. 4 (1995); Robert Cooper and Gibson Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and 0rganizational Analysis: An Introduction,” Organizational Studies 9, no. 1 (1988); Susan Stanford Freidman, “Definitional Excur- sions:The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001).
The injunction to “be objective” seems far less onerous, technically and perhaps morally, for astronomers, physicists, and the like, who deal with inanimate objects, than for anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, and even economists, who study people with attitudes, values, and beliefs, who live relationship-filled lives. What’s more, if their relationships, attitudes, feelings, and values are what make people tick and make them interesting, wouldn’t their efforts to put their feelings and relationships aside make experts less than human? Why would we want less-than-human experts explaining human behavior or human societies? 0n the whole question of objectivity and subjectivity in science see R.J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
Julian Orr highlights the importance of stories at work, in conversations that may not specifically be about work. Julian E. Orr, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
As you’ll see, a good deal of knowledge-work consists of organizing, and much of the work of organizing involves making sense of what happened, such as what people said or did, and then deciding what to do. I’m going to call this “meaning making.” Karl Weick calls it “sensemaking” and has written a book explaining that this is mostly what people do in organizations. Work is nothing more, or less, than sensemaking. Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1995); and Making Sense of the Organization (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2001).
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). Getting into work. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_2
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